The Nerves in Patterns

Abstract

The Eliots liked to dance. It was one of the things they did together. At their flat in Crawford Mansions he would roll up the carpet and ‘seriously’ dance the fox trot to music on the gramophone. He had taken lessons in Boston, and in London on one occasion cancelled a meeting with Wyndham Lewis because he and Vivien were going to a dance studio. At one time too they went on Sundays to a dance hall in Queensway with Brigit Patmore. She was unnerved by Eliot — he could be ‘winning and cordial’ but lacked ‘a grace, a carelessness’ — but on this occasion she was impressed by his attitude towards Vivien who practised a step like the ballerina Karsavina in a chemist’s shop on their way home. Vivien took ballet lessons, paid for by Bertrand Russell, so it seemed, and was more of an accomplished dancer than Eliot; more accomplished even than her brother Maurice’s wife, Ahmé Hoagland, who was a professional cabaret dancer (Spender, 1967: 58; Eliot, 1988: 122; Patmore, 1968: 84–5, 89–90; Seymour-Jones, 2001: 242). Sometimes, dissatisfied with Eliot, she would find other partners, at the Savoy in earlier years and later with ‘Freddie’ or ‘Hawkinson’ who she met at Caxton Hall or the Elysée Galleries. There too she was ‘Picked up by three

This was the last dance; a horrid One Step. Sibylla gave Mike a good deal of harsh instruction. ‘Now dance, for a change,’ she said. ‘Don’t spring and leap, for God’s sake! Glide, don’t lurch. Lean over me — don’t drag at me. That’s better. Now you’re dancing, for a change — you never do dance, you know, you simply march about. Come on, let’s get a move on — you’ve got no energy, that’s what’s the matter with you. Dance, I say.’